Some Smooth Seas

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Some folks don’t like “Sea Days”, some folks do but if you do a Transatlantic you’d better make sure you like them. Luckily we do. We had fairly smooth sailing through the night, especially when compared to our approach to the Azores. We were supposed to do our trans-Atlantic crossing on the Nieuw Amsterdam when we booked this cruise nearly two years ago. Last January we were informed that that final leg of our cruise had been cancelled. Sharon supposed it was because Holland America had gotten a charter to remain in the Mediterranean. We learned however that they had instead decided to remain in the Mediterranean for two additional one-week cruises. This is probably a mistake that they won’t make again. We learned that the Nieuw Amsterdam was forced to remain at sea instead of reaching Barcelona for the embarkation of their rescheduled trans-Atlantic crossing. This meant dealing with hundreds of missed flights for those disembarking in Barcelona. Imagine, all of those people who were leaving, and had already packed their bags leaving them in the hall for the stewards to port ashore, and stuck on the ship for an extra day. Or the hundreds of people arriving in Barcelona by air, whom Holland America now had to foot the bill for hotels. I’m suspecting this was a costly misjudgment. I noticed that Carnival Stock (who owns Holland America) took a hit of about $2 in the past couple days… I wonder why). It was a lazy morning. I was busy working on the blog from way O’dark early, and Sharon was reclining in bed with her phone trying to shake this cough that has plagued her for a couple of days. Well she was so comfortable that she dallied so long she soon found herself missing mass. I’m wondering how many Hail Mary’s that’s going to cost her.



The “Trouble with Team Trivia” as you may have surmised from the day before, is it takes up so much DAM time both in playing the game; and, later in writing the blog. We’ve got a great core team with Jim, Lucia, Stewart and Vanne that we wanted to join them in the Pub Trivia; but, it means we need to eat right when they start serving in the Vista Dining Room or we won’t finish by 7PM. And the Travel Trivia in the morning is a nice way to start the day; although, it is a lot of trivia.



We went up to the Crow’s Nest to join Jim and Lucia who had already set a claim to our favorite table. I went over to get some scrap paper and today’s Sudoku puzzles and Sharon and I did our challenge. It was still thirty minutes until it would be time to start. Sharon pointed out that I’d forgotten to mention that she’d beaten me in yesterday’s Sudoku Easy puzzle (but only by twenty seconds); but, hey… I figure she has final editing privileges and if she didn’t think it was important to add then… I’m just saying! Well, she beat me. This is not so much a retraction as a statement of omission. We both zipped through the first game only this time I came out twenty seconds ahead. I noticed that Sharon also used no annotations, so it’s amazing that I won! I think it’s only because she had to stop and ponder at one point, I think because she couldn’t read her scrawl; but, she was able to sort it out and continue. The Hard puzzle was a bit tougher, and did need a few annotations, and I won by a larger margin. Both Jim and Vanne are bemused by our daily challenges. Stewart and Vanne arrived, and they were soon followed by KK with the Travel Trivia score sheets. She apologized for not having her own sheets today, but had to borrow some of Mike’s Team Trivia forms. (Mike’s sheets are numbered 1 to 20 with one bonus; for Travel Trivia there are just 15 questions and one bonus). KK started with “What now sits atop the former Circus under Nero in Roman Times?” We guessed “St. Peters”. When we saw the answer on the sheet that we were grading (“Colosseum”) I figured that that may be right. I knew that Rome burned under Nero, and that the Colosseum was built after that date. The answer that KK was looking for was “St. Peter’s Square”. After a lot of soul searching, she accepted anything with “St. Peters” in it, as well as the Vatican. To be honest, the Vatican City consists mainly of St. Peters Square and the buildings surrounding the square. But there was a group near where KK announces from that kept nitpicking her answers, and questioning her to allow other possibilities, that I’m surprised that she didn’t accept “Italy”. (And no, our team was not the nitpickers). We would soon see just out of control she was as a trivia host, and why Dave on the Nieuw Amsterdam emphasized his rules for handling situations such as this. Sharon and I had been to Petra in the previous year, so we knew what country it was in; but, our teammates didn’t. Jordan. We missed out on what the currency of Greenland is. Our answer was “Euro”. But KK announced that the currency is the Danish Krone. The nitpickers wanted her to accept simply “Kroner” (which isn’t even right). There are many types of currencies with “krone” as the first five letters, so you really do need to cite which ones you mean. Well, she caved in to the nitpickers. Next came, “Where in the world would you find the largest pyramid?” Can you really blame us for going with “Las Vegas”? She was looking for (the Great Pyramid of the Sun in) Teotihuacan. The nitpickers wanted her to accept “Mexico”. At first she said okay. Then she said, “No. My answer only says Teotihuacan… not Teotihuacan, Mexico.” But the whiners continued to complain. So finally she relented and accepted “Mexico”. She did apologize at the end for being so wishy-washy and promised that before she went to bed this evening she would do a great deal of soul-searching as to why in the world she had ever agreed to host Travel Trivia when asked by Mike. And she promised to return in the morning with bullet-proof answers (it might help if she had a backbone). Some fact checking later discovered that this super-high pyramid comes in at about 250 feet. Our answer, Las Vegas with the Luxor Casino/Hotel comes in at 350 feet; but, the obvious answer The Great Pyramid of Giza… well it comes in at a whopping 450 feet! The undisputed answer should be the Ryugyang Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea at 1,087 feet. Needless to say, the nitpickers managed to come in first place. The real irritation with KK came when she was reviewing the answers, and with question 1 on the Nero question, she went into a 5 minute “history lesson”; which, wouldn’t be so bad except that Jim, Lucia, Sharon and I were all waiting to rush off to breakfast and she just dragged out the torture. We lost, and we knew it.



We breakfasted in the Lido. I’m going back to Swiss Muesli (for now) and Sharon is enjoying her scrambled eggs and toast. It’s been a couple days and I haven’t seen any of those pecan croissants for a while; although, I keep looking. But as late as we’re getting to breakfast, I wouldn’t doubt that someone else is getting my croissants.



We checked out the casino on the way back to the room. The tables weren’t open yet (they open at 10 AM). Sharon played the slots for a piece, and I went to the front desk to cash out my Euros. I made the mistake of believing that since I got a good rate from going from Dollars to Euros, that I’d also get a good rate from Euros to Dollars. Since they would give you better than 80 Euros for $100, I would have thought that I would get more than $100 for 95 Euros; but, that was not the case! Lesson learned.



We had lunch in the Lido. Sharon saved us a table and I fetched her sliced turkey, a baked potato and some butter. I went and tried some of the Indonesian offerings with satay, chicken and rice. It was quite good. Sharon likes their roast turkey best of all, and they’ve had it a number of times on the cruise. Which is impressive because turkeys, as I remember, aren’t really available in Europe.



We headed back up to the Crow’s Nest for 1 PM Team Trivia. Our team was all ready when Mike arrived. Sharon pooh-poohed my suggestion that the answer to “In 1961, Fred Rose, Jimmy Rogers and who were the first to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame?” was, the guy who died in the car crash. I was having trouble coming up with Hank Williams… senior moment I suppose. When Sharon exclaims “Hank Williams” she looked at me like I was crazy when I asked her, “Isn’t he the guy that died in a car crash?” I don’t think she listens to me! Well now she says she thought I said Airplane Crash. And we guessed who invented the wrist watch in 1904… we guessed right with Cartier. Somebody on one of the other teams knew “What was the given name of Chubby Checkers.” We went with Chester (Sharon thought his first name was Chester) Smith (we needed the most common last name to give us the best chance of getting it right). Well, it wasn’t Chester, and it was a common last name (just not Smith). Earnest Evans! We should have known what country contains the magnetic North Pole. We guessed Russia. Somehow I hadn’t considered Canada. After considerable discussion we came up with the 3-point bonus question: “What three countries built the Suez Canal?” For some reason our British teammates were first thinking it wasn’t Great Britain. We all agreed on France. When we added Egypt to the list we had the 3 points in our pocket. It just wasn’t enough and we lost by two points!



We headed to the casino, and Sharon settled down at her machine. She’s about even on the cruise, but has had a little bit of rough going lately. There was a dealer at the Fun-21 table so I sat down and played. Things were going pretty well when they brought in a new dealer. He seemed to be very “lucky”; but, when all of the kings get removed from the deck, one of the consequences is that the dealer will not bust as often as normal. The same should apply to the player… and I’m sure it affects when you should hit as a player. I enjoyed play for about one hour, all the while playing by myself. It suited me fine that the ladies that sat down the day before were busy flirting with the dealer on the other table. One thing struck me… they weren’t drinking, so it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t the booze talking the day before… maybe they really are the way they are… lonely.



Bingo was at 4:30 PM today. I caught up with Sharon at her machine in time to watch her cash out for 13 cents so I guess I don’t need to ask how things went. I headed up to the Crow’s Nest to get my Happy Hour drink and Sharon went to the Showroom to get us a seat (with a table). I got a White Russian with a bit of Crème de Cacao added… I tried to get one White Russian and one Crème de Cacao shot on the side, but they require you to get two of the same drink to get the Happy Hour second drink for $1 offer. I was pretty sure on the Nieuw Amsterdam they would let you get one drink for him and a different drink for her for the same Happy Hour deal… but I can’t be certain. I just took the top card Sharon handed me without checking the numbers. Andy started calling the single-regular-Bingo game, and after just three calls we had our first stander just two tables away in our row! One look at the numbers called and it was easy to see, we probably didn’t want to hear Andy calling any “I’s”. Andy must have heard what I was thinking because he did call “I-24”. Then he called “I-30”. And then he called “I-16”. That first stander was dying a thousand deaths, and everyone else in the room felt imminent doom with each “I” called. I heard her mutter, “I hate standing first!” With each “I” called that lone stander has about a 15% chance of winning. We both got to stand during the first game, Sharon first, and two calls later me. There were an awful lot of people standing, and an awful lot of numbers had been called, when a lone person shouted “Bingo”. The $115 was all hers. The second game, four corners, went pretty quick. We did quite poorly, but consoled ourselves that the bigger prizes are yet to come. The third game was a double-bingo. We both had cards filled with many 3-in-a-row combinations. I was about to stand when “B-10” was called; but, someone on the other side of the room shouted “Bingo”. Our hopes now hung on the blackout game, and the possible $15,000 bonus jackpot. My top of three squares looked promising, but my hopes dwindled when six straight calls failed to improve the square needing just six more numbers. I reached the point where there were just six calls left before the jackpot was off the table, and Andy called “B-10”. That was one of my numbers. Unfortunately Andy failed to follow through. We were both left needing two more calls when someone shouted “Bingo”. We returned to the cabin to get ready for dinner.



The late Bingo start meant that we would have little more than one hour to eat in the Main Dining Room. We asked for a table by ourselves. I started with the beef and chicken satay. Next I had the pasta Faggioli. The soup was a bit too watery for me, and there were very few beans in the soup, and not enough ditalini either. It was a tasty broth nonetheless. I followed that with a very good salad with tomatoes and an Italian dressing. Sharon was forced to watch me chow down on these mini-courses before our entrees came. She got the prime rib and baked potato. And yes Erin, that would be a “Special Meal” baked potato. I had the herb crusted scallops, and this ranks easily in the top five of my favorite meals so far on these combined cruises. Sharon went with the chocolate Devil’s food cake with orange buttercream. I chose the rum-cake. We finished and needed to rush to Trivia, stopping on our way in the cabin to fetch pens.



We got to the pub trivia where our team had garnered a table behind the bar. The Crow’s Nest was crowded and our team was having trouble keeping the seats for us, and were worried we might be no-shows. And we were able to help with the first question: “What river winds through Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Serbia (and some others)?” Vanne started to write down “Rhein” for our answer, but we corrected that to “Danube”. One nice thing about sitting where we are is that there are no nearby teams to hear us in this noisy environment. “What was the first Lifesaver flavor?” We get this wrong every time! Sharon was sure that it was Spearmint, noting that we’ve had this wrong before. What is it they say about people who don’t learn from their mistakes? Well, the answer, my favorite of the Lifesaver flavors, is Peppermint! Vanne and Stewart are looking at each other asking, “What’s a Lifesaver?” It must be an American thing. After we described them they said “Oh Bolos” Andy then hit us with a whole slew of questions that we’d heard on the Nieuw Amsterdam. Stewart thought that the meaning of the acronym for “GOLF” was great; but, Vanne only said, “Well, that’s sort of sexist, isn’t it?” We didn’t know what the animal is that gives us cashmere. I was thinking, “Goat? Nah, it can’t be goat.” When someone suggested alpaca, we went with that. Need I say that it was goat? We were clueless when it came to, “In what book were Piggy and Ralph stranded on a desert island?” To come up with something, we chose “Swiss Family Robinson”. It was “Lord of the Flies”. The bonus was to name the four additional languages that James Bond speaks, besides English. We were pretty sure of French, German and Russian. We should have chosen Italian over Spanish. Still, we were credited with 3 of 4 possible points. The winners missed just one question.



We went to see the Piano Brothers playing lively tunes on the grand and baby-grand pianos onstage. Their music was full of energy and they spent time playing dueling pianos and other times both playing on the grand piano. Sharon was impressed at how quickly, smoothly and seamlessly they were able to change positions on the piano (switching sides) and interlock arms as needed for their parts; and, apparently not missing a note! Sharon’s Piano Teacher Penney would have really enjoyed the show. They invited the band pianist to join them and they played as a trio on the grand piano. She appeared to really enjoy playing with this duo (who aren’t really brothers). They were invited by Steinway to compose and play the musical score for a short documentary they were preparing showing the craftsmanship that goes into building a piano. Their original score complimented the movie quite well and it was easy to see why Steinway selected this talented duo to do the audio track for their movie.

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